Imagine you’ve sat down with your favorite novel. While you’re reading, what do you feel? If, in part, it’s an emotional connection with a character, you’re not alone. This is a common experience; and plenty has been written about it, in both popular and scholarly spaces. Because it’s powerful and strange, this feeling. Powerful enough to make you cry. Strange in that it’s fictional characters we’re talking about.
But I’m interested in a different feeling we can have while reading fiction, something that sure seems like an emotional connection with the author, the real person responsible for those characters who make us cry. When we read, we might feel as though we are in a conversation with the author, a conversation that is both intimate and emotionally rich. Sometimes this apparent relationship might even be powerful enough to feel like a peculiar form of friendship. As a character in John Green’s novel-turned-movie The Fault in Our Stars says, “My third best friend was an author. . .